


UNSTOPPABLE

by glinda4thegood



Category: Lone Gunmen
Genre: Gen, x-files
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-03-31
Updated: 2008-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-15 12:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/160796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glinda4thegood/pseuds/glinda4thegood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-pilot thoughts on the nature of time, the universe, and kissing upside down.</p>
            </blockquote>





	UNSTOPPABLE

_**FIC Lone Gunmen: Unstoppable**_  
Title: **UNSTOPPABLE**  
Author: Glinda  
Rating: PG-13 Adult language/concepts  
Disclaimers: Who were those guys responsible for the existence of The Lone Gunmen? What have they done lately? Thanks to Kurt Vonnegut for Billy Pilgrim's existence.  
Summary: Post-pilot thoughts on the nature of time, the universe, and kissing upside down.  


  
THE JOURNALS OF MELVIN FROHIKE: UNSTOPPABLE

 _Tonight I feel like Billy Pilgrim. Melvin Frohike has come unstuck in time. I can't stop thinking about the taste of strawberries._

Standing at the bar last week, over at the _Back Door_ , I watched a little platinum blonde order a strawberry daiquiri. Most of the Door's clientele eschews mixed drinks, so I think Louie was surprised he had a bottle of mix, and more surprised to find his blender worked. He winked at me as he served her. She drank it quick, and left after checking out the regulars. If I hadn't been thinking about strawberries, I might have turned on the Frohike charm. Her face would have been more attractive surrounded by natural-colored hair, but she was stacked, and until you have a little conversation you never know. You never know.

But I was lost in the memory of strawberries and a hot spring morning in a Miami farmers market.

 _It's better if you go out to the fields yourself, pick 'em and eat 'em as you squat and rummage in the vines._ They're red all the way to the hulls, ripe through and through. Cool from the earth, but not too cold like they get when refrigerated; sweet and acid, soft and juicy, apt to deposit those tiny hard seeds between your teeth. We didn't go to the fields that morning, just bought a quart in the market then sat and ate them all, flicked hulls at each other and laughed. When I smell strawberries I remember Nikita's joyous shouts of laughter, the shape of her ears emerging from the soft cloud of hair as her head tilted back. I remember her mouth, hot and sweet and a little acid.

Memory. A blessing and a curse.

 _Fast forward._ I bought a quart of strawberries at the store yesterday. The tips were red and the tops were creamy white and green. Most of the quart was bruised and moldy -- those places hidden by the clever placement of colorful labels. I washed the rest and cut off the unripe tops. What was left barely filled a cereal bowl. I took them out into the alley and sat on the steps, in the sun. After the first two unsatisfactory, crunchy, tasteless berries, I lobbed the rest into the air. Birds are more pragmatic about their food. They aren't hindered by the ability to remember and compare. They won't turn down a free berry because they can imagine or remember better.

Imagination can be a greater curse than memory.

Tonight it took me nearly forty minutes to get the mud and oily grease out from under my nails, but if the hot water had lasted I might have stood in the shower another forty minutes, thinking. I think good in the shower. Something about the constant noise of spray beating against the walls, something about the comfort of wet heat on my skin. Shower stall as post-birth womb. Without my glasses I can barely see anyway, so I close my eyes as I wash.

I've got bruises on my back, bruises on my legs, a big-ass bruise on my big ass, and -- even though they only exist because I am a man, and can imagine -- bruises on my heart.

When I was younger, I didn't bruise like this. I didn't fall on my face every time someone dropped a banana peel. There was even a time I was positively graceful, learned and practiced during those pre-and-early Miami days.

Before Byers and Langly. Before Mulder and Scully. Before I knew how little I know about the universe.

 _Unstuck again, I'm back with Dad in the garage, handing him tools._ The engine he tinkered with came apart and went together with elbow grease, profanity, and invention. Dad's imagination was limited to the mechanical, but within that narrow scope he was a master. Moving forward and I'm in the garage alone. Half the engine is spread out on the workbench. Far away from the little house we own, far away from the auto factory that paid him well for years of production, Dad rested in a plain casket enclosed by a concrete vault. Brought low by his lifetime consumption of Morleys.

 _Back to the future._ When I took apart Bert Byers' car, I thought that dead cars and live cars smell much the same. Oil, gasoline, bitter metal, acrid plastic. Easier to deal with than the smells Scully must encounter when she does autopsies. I couldn't tell Byers, but I enjoyed doing the autopsy on that car. Finding the remote control module was an unexpected bonus.

The introduced impurity. The doomsday device. The smell of burning fuel and strawberries.

 _"Is America a better place to live because of us?"_

I worry about Byers. After eleven years of working together, we've reached the point where married couples often hit a rough patch. I'm not qualified to counsel him. He needs someone sensitive, literate, and nonjudgmental; someone who can delicately impart the suggestion that Byers' desire to _Do The Right Thing_ has been downgraded toward common zealot activism, liberally laced with hubris. I know this because, cynical bastard that I am, I qualified for my hubris card before Byers did.

 _I'm standing in the crowd, listening to Bert Byers' eulogy, wondering at the unexpected whimsy of the ash-scattering rocket._ I've seen Byers miserable before, soul sick and hurt. Suzanne kissed him even as she twisted his guts into a permanent knot. Bertram Byers, cold, crotchety SOB, treasured his own welfare most of all; he locked his son out of his life, implying John was the defective one. The truth is the old man knew the boy was the reality of everything he gave lip service to.

Lip. Service.

 _Further back, out of control, and I think I pulled a groin muscle trying to cope with the unexpected acrobatics._ I'm in the harness, bobbing like a poorly controlled Duncan yo-yo. Deal with it, Frohike. Do the job. Upside-down the slim figure looked a lot like someone who could have been Byers' brother. Fastidiously trimmed facial hair, neat overcoat that moved around a pair of long legs with a swagger Byers couldn't mimic if he tried. Fingers grabbed my head, lips covering my mouth. My imagination now has a reference for what being hit with a curare dart might be like, or the moments following cryogenic storage. Instinct assured me it was unlikely any man would have a tongue like that, even though sluggish memory offered gossip about Alex Krycek.

The mouth, tongue and chip were gone. I smelled strawberries until we were violated by odors of cheap baby-powdered latex and cheaper aftershave.

Life is all about loss. Accept it, don't accept it. It doesn't matter. I don't know why Yves kissed me at that moment. Later I threatened her with exposure, told her I knew about her, and that was only partially true. I don't know everything about her, I don't know why she really helped us in the end. She could have stopped me from getting away with the chip after I grabbed it. She didn't.

It's almost as if she seized a chance to create a link between us.

 _Riding the backwards coaster I'm standing at his apartment door, drunk as a lord._ Part of me blubbers like a baby, part of me wonders whether Scully would accept a full body hug and cuddle. Life is so short, I should have offered. When he reappeared (more substantial than Hamlet's father and less intelligible, proclaiming a message we already knew: "there's something really rotten going on,") Mulder sent me a copy of 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail,' and a cheap Thank You card that said -- "I'm not dead yet!"

False alarm. Welcome to Milliways. The universe will _really_ end in ten seconds . . . Will there be time for me to get another card in the mail?

 _Life is all about whimsy._

I sit here tonight, touching memories like a rosary, wondering if we're smart enough to decide what makes the world a better place to live in. Are we smart enough to make our own lives better? Who do we love, who loves us? If we sat down on the scale, would the meter read _bad_ or _good_ egg? Are our eyes sharp enough, our wits keen enough to enter the universe's hall of mirrors and pick out which shining surface reflects the truth of ourselves?

Problem is the devil may look like a senator, or president; he may be signing legislation, offering deals and treaties and money to the rest of the world. He may believe that what he does will save people from their own poor choices. The devil may look like a soldier, a doctor, a lawyer, a priest, a teacher. Like a parent. Or, if Mulder is right, the devil may look a lot like the cover of Jose Chung's last book.

The devil might look like Melvin Frohike.

 _Snap to the now._

I sit here at my computer and write in my journal. Byers and Langly sleep like drugged puppies. My hip and butt hurt. We did a good piece of work tonight. Lives were saved. Property protected. People alerted to corporate electronic voyeurs -- and worse.

Why don't I value our accomplishment more? Why do I keep hearing Byers' voice say "my father died long before the crash." The truth in that statement transcends what he meant when he said it. Bert Byers still breathes, eats, eliminates waste, communicates with others of his kind. Bert Byers the man is alive. Bertram Roosevelt Byers, father of John, is dead as a doornail.

They are my sons now, my brothers. My best friends. Like Dad used to say (before the term took on a malevolent implication), the gang I run with. One of the songs that explodes from Langly's bedroom in the morning lately makes a perpetual loop between my ears.

 _Together we are unstoppable._

Hubris. We won the game in the last few seconds by sending in someone off the bench who'd never suited up for a game before. We won without applause, without a parade, without cheerleaders.

God help us, I think Byers is beginning to miss the cheerleaders.

 _Moving way back, Georgia Benson stands at the edge of the field, flinging her pompons into the air._ Every boy in school has heard the rumors about Georgia Benson. She kisses with her tongue, and if you spend some money for a nice date Georgia doesn't mind having her breasts groped. I never had the balls to ask her out. I was only thirteen, still working on my balls.

 _Back to the now._ I've been around the block, and groped a lot of pompons on the way. Boasting in the boys bathroom about a kiss with tongue seems . . .

I never considered how tongues might interact if engaged while one participant was hanging upside down. Yves stuck her tongue into my mouth and pressed the entire surface of that hot, squirming little muscle up against my own. That kiss is better proof of my physical state of health than a stress test. If my heart was bad that kiss would have left me flopping like a guppy stranded on the carpet.

Kisses don't always communicate passion. I've watched all the Godfather movies. In the lexicon of physical communication a kiss can convey a bewildering and contradictory number of concepts from familial affection to eviction notice. What was Yves going for? Why do I keep seeing Clevon Little's face, and hear the words "Candy-gram for Mongo"? Why am I thinking about the Banks family at Number Seventeen Cherry-Tree Lane?

 _The wind has just changed and all I can smell is the scent of strawberries._


End file.
